Rokas Bendikas
Qianyi Deng is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford and a co-founder of Piggy Robotics. Her work focuses on building affordable humanoid robots using artificial muscle systems. Her research combines robotics, materials, and practical engineering to make humanoid robots more accessible and cost-effective. Through Piggy Robotics, she aims to reduce the cost and complexity of humanoid systems while maintaining useful real-world functionality. Her work sits at the intersection of academic research and real-world robotics development.
Rokas Bendikas is a PhD candidate in Foundational Artificial Intelligence atUniversity College London(UCL) and the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Laelaps AI. His work focuses on autonomous robotics, spatial intelligence, and AI systems designed for security and defence applications. At Laelaps AI, based in Zurich, he leads the development of AI-driven autonomous robotic systems that improve surveillance, rapid response, and decision-making in critical environments. The company targets residential, commercial, and defence sectors, with a strong focus on reliability, adaptability, and cost efficiency.
Academically, Rokas works on spatial intelligence using 3D world models. His PhD research is supervised by leading experts at UCL and the University of California, San Diego. He has also been a visiting researcher at UC San Diego, collaborating with the Hao Su Lab on machine learning and robotics.
Rokas has strong industry experience. He worked as a Research Scientist intern at Qualcomm in the Embodied AI team, where he built object-centric Vision-Language-Action models. Earlier, he completed a deep learning internship at MathWorks, contributing to MATLAB’s Deep Learning Toolbox and performance analysis in Simulink. He also held research roles at King’s College London, working on medical imaging, computer vision, and neural networks.
In education, he holds an MSc in Computing with a focus on AI and Machine Learning from Imperial College London and a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering fromKing’s College London. He has also worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and a Visiting Lecturer, teaching robotics, AI, and machine learning.
Rokas has published peer-reviewed research in medical simulation and electrophysiology and has received several honours, including being named in Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in 2025.
